Friday, April 13, 2012

President Obama, during an interview with St. Louis's KMOV, was hammered for "jetting around, [taking] different vacations and so forth, sometimes ... under the color of state business." The interviewer, Larry Conners, suggested even that folks "get frustrated, even angered" seeing the president take these trips, and told Obama that these Americans think he's "out of touch, that [Obama doesn't] really know what they're experiencing right now."

...Obama: “But the fact of the matter is, I think if you look at my track record, I’m raising a family here. When we travel, we got to travel through Secret Service, and Air Force One, that's not my choice. I think most folks understand how hard I work and how hard this administration is working on behalf of the American people.”

This little excursion into intellectual history is important because it goes to the heart of a rarely discussed feature of the climate change debate. The conservative sceptics of climate change science adopt the same underlying argument about climatology that left wing academics have been making for decades about science in toto.

Only the left wing academics are shamefully silent about this as they poo-poo their supposedly simpleton conservative cousins.

Climate change scepticism has rested on a number of claims about the science of climate change. These range from the claim that the atmosphere has not been warming, that the amount of warming, to the extent that it has occurred, has been insignificant, or that warming is due to natural variation rather than induced by the activities of man.

Given all this it is only right and proper to adopt a typically sceptical stance about the knowledge claims made by established Earth science; there is not sufficient evidence to assert that we know that global temperatures have been rising due to human action.

It is important that we realise that this scepticism is empirically based. It does not adopt a sceptical stance toward science as such, although unsophisticated sceptics tend to unwittingly flirt with it when engaged in disputation.

1 comment:

Robert of Ottawa
said...

Coudn't find a place to comment on this article.

Plain fact is that the warmistas have not disproved that the current climate is totally natural, and shown that it i unnatural.

I find this unnatural for scientists. Occam's razor says, go for the simplest explaination until disproved. The Warmistas have never disproved the Natural Variability argument. They simply dismiss it out of hand (because they cannot .. but we won't accuse those b#stards of dishonesty)